Tye’s Representationalism: Feeling the Heat?

Abstract

According to Tye’s PANIC theory of consciousness, perceptualstates of creatures which are related to a disjunction ofexternal contents will fail to represent sensorily, andthereby fail to be conscious states. In this paper I arguethat heat perception, a form of perception neglected in therecent literature, serves as a counterexample to Tye’sradical externalist claim. Having laid out Tye’s `absentqualia’ scenario, the PANIC theory from which it derivesand the case of heat perception as a counterexample, Idefend the putative counterexample against three possibleresponses: (1) that heat perception represents general(i.e. non-disjunctive) intrinsic properties of objects,(2) that heat perception represents the non-specific heatenergy that is transferred between a subject’s body andanother body and (3) that heat perception exclusivelyrepresents heat properties of the subject’s own body.